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Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Please share your experience in leading your school or colleagues to further and better adopt technology to transform education!

I'm looking for colleagues who have guided others in adopting
technology more deeply and/or have helped schools and staffs get past
resistance to change – short descriptions of such experience to be included in
anupcoming ISTE Book!

Please share a short description of how you led your school
or colleagues to further and better adopt technology to transform education.

I’m currently under contract with ISTE Books to produce a
book that will serve as a guide to technology leaders (school or district level)
to encourage, guide, and establish effective (technology) change in schools.
These may be individuals who’ve informally taken on the work of supporting
their school in evolving and furthering its efforts in making the crucial
change to a digital learning environment – ORthey may be those who’ve formally been appointed to do so by school or district
administration, or perhaps encouraged or nominated to engage in this important
work by colleagues.

I’m looking for (roughly) 20 individuals who have made
important discoveries about how to facilitate such change, convince colleagues
and superiors of the importance of technology (especially for instruction), and
have successfully dealt with resistance to change (teachers and/or
supervisors), confusion about how to structure change in the school setting,

Important discoveries? Yes, from the standpoint of being
instructive to the great number of colleagues who are engaged in similar work
or about to set out on it and who may gain insight from hearing and reflecting
on your experience?

These snapshot stories of personal experience will be
included in the book in short (roughly 1 page or slightly longer) segments.
Those who contribute these professional anecdotes and reflections will be formally
credited and profiled in the book.

Contributors
need not be accomplished writers!Contributions
will be edited and polished to fit in the book.

If you are interested in sharing your experience and expertise, please email a brief, informal description of your
experience to begin a dialogue. Please let me know:
-What aspect of the change to a
digitally supported Learning environment your experience addresses
- What problem your efforts solved or
helped solve
- Which barriers to technology adoption and maximized appropriate use your
efforts have supported or encouraged others to surmount…
- Which aspect of resistance to change you’ve dealt with and how.etc.

For those from whom I've requested more detail after our first exchange, please reflect on the following... (or perhaps you are just curious)

Moving forward, we
need to narrow down the narrative of your experience. Below is a list of ideas
about how tech leaders (school-based, either formally appointed to assume that
role, or those who have informally stepped into it… or, perhaps, district based
individuals who address the needs of schools and classroom teachers, etc.) have
supported school communities in moving further in the digital transformation
that inevitably will involve the entire field.

Based on the list you see below how shall we describe your experience?(And, of course, feel free to come up with
other ideas and/or the verbiage you’d prefer to use to describe it)

We can capture your ‘story’ by you writing your ideas and responses (I’ll edit
as needed afterward), or we can setup
an appointment for me to interview you.

In the end, in the approximately 400 – 700 words the book
can devote to your ‘story’ we want to present (at a minimum the following
ideas) - (I MAY expand the word count a bit after I see a few examples of the
stories…

-How is it
that you stepped into the role of… (we have some flexibility with the precise
wording – but, the gist of it is… technology leader, technology guide, digital
change agent, etc?
(Actually, if there is a title or name of your role in this capacity, please
let me know as that may help explain your experience)

-Who have
you worked with in this capacity? (NOT the names of specific individuals, but
an indication of the types of people you have supported – and how – and some
indication of how many…

-What sort
of change have you supported the school or teachers to make?
(related to the above; ‘what’s the accomplishment’?)

-What
challenge(s) did you face in making this happen?

-How did
you surmount this challenge(s) (barrier,
obstacle, etc.)?

Also, we will need to provide some hard information about where you
accomplished the above – who you worked with (again, NOT specific names, but
some information… e.g. ‘the school’s Science Teachers… or perhaps, the school’s
Upper Elementary Teachers… or perhaps, the district’s ELA Teachers, etc. etc.
etc.)

The purpose of the above section is to provide other educators who will
take on the work of supporting or further the significant adoption of
technology to improve and positively transform classrooms and the educational
experience they provide our students – This section of the book, which
highlights colleagues who have already been involved in this crucial work… and
explains briefly their experience and ideasto provide insight, inspiration, and a body of ideas to draw on as they
move forward.

I don’t need to make every story absolutely unique, but I do feel the
need to provide a wide array of ideas and experience, which is why I want to
make each well defined and have it offer readers some solid insight and
understanding.

Further, if you think of any items that you don’t see on the list, but
believe should be there… PLEASE let me know!

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Challenges

Resistance to Change
- fear of class management problems
- fear of too much work
- fear of looking foolish
- NO motivation to change to tech- fear of the unfamiliar
- Teachers claim they can’t integrate tech into lessons because the
students don’t have sufficient tech skills and they don’t have time or
expertise tech skills to students

Negative Undertanding of Technology and its role and impact in
Education - Teachers firmly hold beliefs that the adoption of technology
is a negative- i.e. tech is bad for kids- technology will replace teachers
-the adoption of technology
will negatively impact one’s teaching or ability to teach (i.e. special
talent or ability is required by teachers, very extensive training is
required, the work involved will be overwhelming, the teacher will look
‘bad’ to the students,
- failure to see the great positives of EdTech, like the ways that
technology makes things like: personalized/individualized instruction, and
PBL manageable, whereas it would be unmanageable without it (although
doable with great difficulty)

Teacher Turnover (a significant portion of the school’s teaching
staff is continually new to the school or profession – those who
provide PD and support end up spending a great deal of time with teachers
at ‘square one’ and there is far less opportunity for the school to have a
crucial mass of teachers who are tech users who may support one another,
ec.

Professional Development not available or not accessible
… and this represents an insurmountable barrier to technology adoption,
intergration and support for better student learning experiences.

Schedule as a barrier- insufficient time for PD, curriculum work, or other time-dependent
factors that act as an impediment to technology adoption

Can’t Flip the Classroom because not all students have a connected
compute or device at home

Solutions and
Approaches to Pressing Past Barriers to Tech Adoptio

Debunking negative and counter-productive myths
and misapprehensions about EdTech

Provide EdTech support to teachers by
establishing peer networks in the school or showing teachers how to join and
participate in them beyond the school

Alternative
Approaches to Professional Development (when not available or not accessible)

- enlisting students to help
- enlisting parents to help
- creating networks of support

Alternative Approach to
Acquiring or Evaluating Resources (when Lack of resources
(or apparent lack of resources) is cited
as an absolute barrier

(possible solution) re-discovering or re-considering overlooked technology
already in place, like student SMART Phones… or perhaps using a single
Interactive White Board to deliver valuable technology supported lessons and
activities to students